General Books - Page 4

In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor's Journey in the Saudi Kingdom

Qanta A. Ahmed

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 29 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"In this stunningly written book, a Western trained Muslim doctor brings alive what it means for a woman to live in the Saudi Kingdom. I've rarely experienced so vividly the shunning and shaming, racism and anti-Semitism, but the surprise is how Dr. Ahmed also finds tenderness at the tattered edges of extremism, and a life-changing pilgrimage back to her Muslim faith." - Gail Sheehy

The decisions that change your life are often the most impulsive ones.

Unexpectedly denied a visa to remain in the United States, Qanta Ahmed, a young British Muslim doctor, becomes an outcast in motion. On a whim, she accepts an exciting position in Saudi Arabia. This is not just a new job; this is a chance at adventure in an exotic land she thinks she understands, a place she hopes she will belong.

What she discovers is vastly different. The Kingdom is a world apart, a land of unparralled contrast. She finds rejection and scorn in the places she believed would most embrace her, but also humor, honesty, loyalty and love.

And for Qanta, more than anything, it is a land of opportunity. A place where she discovers what it takes for one woman to recreate herself in the land of invisible women. (20080801)

Enrique's Journey

Sonia Nazario

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Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Children's Studies

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 51 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this astonishing true story, award-winning journalist Sonia Nazario recounts the unforgettable odyssey of a Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States.
When Enrique is five years old, his mother, Lourdes, too poor to feed her children, leaves Honduras to work in the United States. The move allows her to send money back home to Enrique so he can eat better and go to school past the third grade.
Lourdes promises Enrique she will return quickly. But she struggles in America. Years pass. He begs for his mother to come back. Without her, he becomes lonely and troubled. When she calls, Lourdes tells him to be patient. Enrique despairs of ever seeing her again. After eleven years apart, he decides he will go find her.
Enrique sets off alone from Tegucigalpa, with little more than a slip of paper bearing his mother’s North Carolina telephone number. Without money, he will make the dangerous and illegal trek up the length of Mexico the only way he can–clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains.
With gritty determination and a deep longing to be by his mother’s side, Enrique travels through hostile, unknown worlds. Each step of the way through Mexico, he and other migrants, many of them children, are hunted like animals. Gangsters control the tops of the trains. Bandits rob and kill migrants up and down the tracks. Corrupt cops all along the route are out to fleece and deport them. To evade Mexican police and immigration authorities, they must jump onto and off the moving boxcars they call El Tren de la Muerte–The Train of Death. Enrique pushes forward using his wit, courage, and hope–and the kindness of strangers. It is an epic journey, one thousands of immigrant children make each year to find their mothers in the United States.
Based on the Los Angeles Times newspaper series that won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for feature writing and another for feature photography, Enrique’s Journey is the timeless story of families torn apart, the yearning to be together again, and a boy who will risk his life to find the mother he loves.



From the Hardcover edition.

Deconstructing Sammy: Music, Money, Madness, and the Mob

Matt Birkbeck

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Sammy Davis Jr. lived a storied life. Adored by millions over a six-decade-long career, he was considered an entertainment icon and a national treasure. But despite lifetime earnings that topped $50 million, Sammy died in 1990 near bankruptcy. His estate was declared insolvent, and there was no possibility of it ever using Sammy's name or likeness again. It was as if Sammy had never existed.

Years later his wife, Altovise, a once-vivacious woman and heir to one of the greatest entertainment legacies of the twentieth century, was living in poverty, and with nowhere else to go, she turned to a former federal prosecutor, Albert "Sonny" Murray, to make one last attempt to resolve Sammy's debts, restore his estate, and revive his legacy. For seven years Sonny probed Sammy's life to understand how someone of great notoriety and wealth could have lost everything, and in the process he came to understand Sammy as a man whose complexity makes for a riveting work of celebrity biography as cultural history.

Matt Birkbeck's serious work of investigative journalism unveils the extraordinary story of an international celebrity at the center of a confluence of entertainment, politics, and organized crime, and shows how even Sammy's outsized talent couldn't save him from himself.

Let's Talk About Pep

Sandy Denton

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Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

She's the spiciest ingredient in the legendary rap group Salt-N-Pepa, and the outspoken star of VH1's smash-hit reality show. She's Sandy "Pepa" Denton -- and she's never at a loss for words. Now, in her first tell-all book, Pepa talks about sex, music, life, love, fame, and so much more....

"Most of you know me as Pep, or Pepa, the fun-loving half of Salt-N-Pepa. I am the party girl, the one who is down for whatever. But behind the laughs and the smiles is a whole lot of pain."

Funny, fearless, and full of life, Sandy "Pepa" Denton is a pop culture icon whose remarkable story is every bit as captivating and provocative as her Grammy Award-winning music. This is the real Pepa -- upfront, uncensored, unstoppable -- and these are the memoirs of a true pioneer, fighter, survivor, and inspiration to women everywhere.

For the first time, Pepa talks about:

• Her troubled childhood
• Surviving abuse
• Her first encounters with Cheryl "Salt" James
• Salt-N-Pepa's instant success
• Her failed marriages and her escape from domestic abuse
• Her "breakup" with Salt and their eventual "reunion"
• Her triumphant comeback on the VH1 reality shows The Surreal Life, Fame Games, and The Salt-N-Pepa Show

Filled with surprising insights, outrageous anecdotes, and celebrity cameos -- including Queen Latifah, Martin Lawrence, Janice Dickinson, Omarosa, Missy Elliott, L.L. Cool J, supermodel Caprice, Ron Jeremy, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopez, "Spinderella," and many others -- Let's Talk About Pep offers a fascinating glimpse behind the fame, family, failures, and successes of celebrity...and into the faithful heart of a woman who will always value the good friends she found along the way. In the words of Sandy "Pepa" Denton, "there's no walking away from that."

The Pursuit of Happyness

Chris Gardner

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 130 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The astounding yet true rags-to-riches saga of a homeless father who raised and cared for his son on the mean streets of San Francisco and went on to become a crown prince of Wall Street

At the age of twenty, Milwaukee native Chris Gardner, just out of the Navy, arrived in San Francisco to pursue a promising career in medicine. Considered a prodigy in scientific research, he surprised everyone and himself by setting his sights on the competitive world of high finance. Yet no sooner had he landed an entry-level position at a prestigious firm than Gardner found himself caught in a web of incredibly challenging circumstances that left him as part of the city's working homeless and with a toddler son. Motivated by the promise he made to himself as a fatherless child to never abandon his own children, the two spent almost a year moving among shelters, "HO-tels," soup lines, and even sleeping in the public restroom of a subway station.

Never giving in to despair, Gardner made an astonishing transformation from being part of the city's invisible poor to being a powerful player in its financial district.

More than a memoir of Gardner's financial success, this is the story of a man who breaks his own family's cycle of men abandoning their children. Mythic, triumphant, and unstintingly honest, The Pursuit of Happyness conjures heroes like Horatio Alger and Antwone Fisher, and appeals to the very essence of the American Dream.

A Piece of Cake: A Memoir

Cupcake Brown

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 169 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

There are shelves of memoirs about overcoming the death of a parent, childhood abuse, rape, drug addiction, miscarriage, alcoholism, hustling, gangbanging, near-death injuries, drug dealing, prostitution, or homelessness.

Cupcake Brown survived all these things before she’d even turned twenty.

And that’s when things got interesting….


You have in your hands the strange, heart-wrenching, and exhilarating tale of a woman named Cupcake. It begins as the story of a girl orphaned twice over, once by the death of her mother and then again by a child welfare system that separated her from her stepfather and put her into the hands of an epically sadistic foster parent. But there comes a point in her preteen years—maybe it’s the night she first tries to run away and is exposed to drugs, alcohol, and sex all at once—when Cupcake’s story shifts from a tear-jerking tragedy to a dark comic blues opera. As Cupcake’s troubles grow, so do her voice and spirit. Her gut-punch sense of humor and eye for the absurd, along with her outsized will, carry her through a fateful series of events that could easily have left her dead.

Young Cupcake learned to survive by turning tricks, downing hard liquor, partying like a rock star, and ingesting every drug she could find while hitchhiking up and down the California coast. She stumbled into gangbanging, drug dealing, hustling, prostitution, theft, and, eventually, the best scam of all: a series of 9-to-5 jobs. But Cupcake’s unlikely tour through the cubicle world was paralleled by a quickening descent into the nightmare of crack cocaine use, till she eventually found herself living behind a Dumpster.

Astonishingly, she turned it around. With the help of a cobbled together family of eccentric fellow addicts and “angels”—a series of friends and strangers who came to her aid at pivotalmoments—she slowly transformed her life from the inside out.

A Piece of Cake is unlike any memoir you’ll ever read. Moving and almost transgressive in its frankness, it is a relentlessly gripping tale of a resilient spirit who took on the worst of contem-porary urban life and survived it with a furious wit and unyielding determination. Cupcake Brown is a dynamic and utterly original storyteller who will guide you on the most satisfying, startlingly funny, and genuinely affecting tour through hell you’ll ever take.



When it came time for me to talk, I wasn’t sure which parts of my past to tell, which to keep secret, and which to pretend never happened. Uncle Jr. had already seen the welts on my back, so he wasn’t too surprised when I told them about some of the physical abuse I endured at Diane’s. Everyone else hit the roof, except Daddy. He got really quiet and started balling and unballing his fists.

I continued my update. Experience had taught me that adults have trouble accepting the idea of children having sex. I decided that from then on, that part of my life never happened. I picked up the story by telling them about Fly, the Gangstas, and getting shot.

I was dying for a cigarette. So it seemed a good time to announce that I smoked cigarettes—and weed.

After a moment Sam looked at me, smiled, and handed me one of her Marlboros. I preferred menthols, but beggars can’t be choosers. I kicked back, took a long drag, and closed my eyes.

Daddy and Jr. were silent. They seemed a bit shocked and unsure about how to respond.

“Well, Cup,” Jr. said, “it’s a little too late to be trying to raise you now. But those cigarettes will kill you. And weed will only lead you to stronger drugs.”

He didn’t know how right he was. But for me, it was too late to be worrying about stronger drugs—the only worrying I did was whether I could find a connection to get some. So I just smiled, nodded, and took another hit off my cigarette.

The eerie quiet returned.

—from A Piece of Cake


Also available as a Random House AudioBook and eBook.


From the Hardcover edition.

No Disrespect

Sister Souljah

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 113 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Harsh realities 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Sistah Souljah created an honest look at the truths of society. To call her a racist for being honest reporting her realities and what she has witnessed in her work and service to communities is mere ignorance. I do not fully agree with every word Sistah writes. However, I commend her honesty, her openness, and her consciousness.

The book is a must read regardless if one agrees or disagrees. It is not to be used as a life manual. It is to be used as a mirror, or a stepping stone. If you are the person she regrets being or you want to elevate to another level the book will give you insight that may not be easily found in accessible literature.

Editorial Review:

Rapper, activist, and hip-hop rebel, Sister Souljah possesses the most passionate and articulate voice to emerge from the projects. Now she uses that voice to deliver what is at once a fiercely candid autobiography and a survival manual for any African American woman determined to keep her heart open and her integrity intact in 1990s America.

The Road to Rescue: The Untold Story of Schindler's List

Mietek Pemper

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Editorial Review:

Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List popularized the true story of a German businessman who manipulated his Nazi connections and spent his personal fortune to save some 1,200 Jewish prisoners from certain death during the Holocaust. But few know that those lists were made possible by a secret strategy designed by a young Polish Jew at the Plaszów concentration camp. Mietek Pemper’s compelling and moving memoir tells the less-known story of how Schindler’s list really came to pass.

Pemper was born in 1920 into a lively and cultivated Jewish family for whom everything changed in 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland. Evicted from their home, they were forced into the Krakow ghetto and, later, into the nearby camp of Plaszów where Pemper’s knowledge of the German language was put to use by the sadistic camp commandant Amon Göth. Forced to work as Göth’s personal stenographer–an exceptional job for a Jewish prisoner–Pemper soon realized that he could use his position to familiarize himself with the inner workings of the Nazi bureaucracy and exploit the system to his fellow detainees’ advantage. Once he gained access to classified documents, Pemper was able to pass on secret information for Schindler to compile his famous lists. After the war, Pemper was the key witness for the prosecution in the 1946 trial against Göth and in trials against several other SS officers. The Road to Rescue stands as a historically authentic testimony of one man’s unparalleled courage, wit, defiance, and bittersweet victory over the Nazi regime.

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

Maxine Hong Kingston

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 170 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Prepare for the unexpected. 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This is a tremendous novel. The author threads the stories her mother told her when she was a child, through the retelling of her own life, using them to draw you into her own imagination. As she grows up, living half immersed in traditional myth and half in gritty reality, where mothers and daughters are only human, the reader grows up with her. The first person telling of her childhhood stories puts the reader directly in the shoes of a child/young adult working through the stories she has been told, using them to form her hopes and dreams and her understanding of the world.

(N.B. You may not think that your childhood stories influenced the way you live, but if you think for a minute, I am certain some will come back to you and you'll realize that just the other day you did something based on or combatting that belief. Maybe you even still wish on stars?)

Editorial Review:

The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author's America is a landscape of confounding white "ghosts"--the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost--with equally rigid, but very different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston carries the crimes against her family carved into her back by her parents in testimony to and defiance of the pain.

A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League

Ron Suskind

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Total reviews: 119 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Ghetto Story 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This book is another ghetto story that has a lot of rhetoric regarding "inner city" life that is packaged to appeal to those who have no idea that this is pure bulls**t. In the book the high school is described as a place where learning is discouraged and success is frowned upon. I was raised in Detroit (the real Detroit, not the suburbs) and I attended Detroit Public Schools. Furthermore I taught for Detroit Public Schools for six years and currently teach for Columbus Ohio City Schools. With about two decades of "inner city" school involvement as a teacher and a student, I have RARELY seen someone picked on because they got good grades. There are some serious issues with inner city education but it is not how they portrayed it. I have seen many students like Cedric and some of them were harassed. It was not because they were smart or had good grades; it was because they were socially clumsy and immature. Students who are socially immature are harassed in many schools, not just in the "inner city". Additionally, the book never mentions what happens to his classmates. The tone implies that they are stuck Southeast Washington. I understand that this book attempts to expose the trials and tribulations of a "inner city" student but it does so by portraying negative and untrue images. If someone wants to read the book to understand the life of an "inner city" student, don't read this book, go to an "inner city" school and see for yourself.

Editorial Review:

Ron Suskind won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1995 for his stories on Cedric Jennings, a talented black teenager struggling to succeed in one of the worst public high schools in Washington, D.C. Suskind has expanded those features into a full-length nonfiction narrative, following Jennings beyond his high-school graduation to Brown University, and in the tradition of Leon Dash's Rosa Lee and Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here, delivers a compelling story on the struggles of inner-city life in modern America. While it appears to have a happy ending (with Jennings earning a B average in his sophomore year), A Hope in the Unseen is not without a few caveats (at times, Jennings feels profoundly alienated from his white peers). Trite as it may sound to say, this book teaches a lesson about the virtue of perseverance, and it's definitely worth reading. --John J. Miller